Aphrodite

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Subject: Aphrodite Tue Jun 15, 2010 2:55 pm

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty and sexuality. According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.[5]

Because of her beauty other gods feared that jealousy would interrupt the peace among them and lead to war, and so Zeus married her to Hephaestus, who was not viewed as a threat. Her unhappiness in marriage caused her to frequently seek out the companionship of her lover Ares. Aphrodite also became instrumental in the Eros and Psyche legend, and later was both Adonis' lover and his surrogate mother.

Aphrodite is also known as Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus) after the two places, Cythera and Cyprus, which claimed her birth. Her Roman equivalent is the goddess Venus. Myrtles, doves, sparrows, and swans are sacred to her. The Greeks identified the Ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor with Aphrodite.[6]

Aphrodite has numerous equivalents: Inanna (Sumerian counterpart), Astarte (Phoenician), Astghik (Armenian), Turan (Etruscan), and Venus (Roman). She has parallels with Indo-European dawn goddesses such as Ushas or Aurora. The Hellenes were well aware that her origins lay in the East: according to Pausanias, the first to establish her cult were the Assyrians, after the Assyrians the Paphians of Cyprus and the Phoenicians who live at Ascalon in Palestine; the Phoenicians taught her worship to the people of Cythera.[7] It was said Aphrodite could make any man fall in love with her at his first sight of her.

Aphrodite also has many other names, such as Acidalia, Cytherea, Pandemos and Cerigo. These names were used in specific areas of Greece. When the Greek cities combined, these lesser names were abandoned and a single name, Aphrodite, was adopted. Each goddess represented a slightly different religion but with overall similarities.

The name Άφροδίτη was connected by folk etymology with ἀφρός (aphros) "foam," interpreting it as "risen from the foam" and embodying it in an etiological myth that was already known to Hesiod.[8] Another folk etymology found in the Etymologicum Magnum and attributed to Didymus attempts to etymologize Aphrodite from the Greek compound ἁβροδίαιτος habrodiaitos ("she who lives delicately" from ἁβρός habros + δίαιτα diaita) explaining the alternation between b and ph as a "familiar" characteristic of Greek "obvious from the Macedonians".[9] Aphros has reflexes in Messapic and Etruscan (whence April), which were probably borrowed from Greek.

Though Herodotus was aware of the Phoenician origins of Aphrodite,[10] linguistic attempts to derive the name Aphrodite from Semitic Aštoret, via undocumented Hittite transmission, remain inconclusive. If Semitic, a not implausible etymology would be from Assyrian barīrītu, a female demon found in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts (see Chicago Assyrian Dictionary vol. 2 p. 111). The name probably means "she who (comes) at dusk," a manifestation of the planet Venus as the evening star, a well known attribute of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar.

A suggestion by M. Hammarström,[11] rejected by Hjalmar Frisk, connects the name with πρύτανις, a loan into Greek from a cognate of Etruscan (e)pruni, "lord" or similar. An etymology from Indo-European abhor "very" + dhei "to shine" is offered by J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams.[12]